Podcasts & Radio

In her new podcast, Everything’s Relative, writer and therapist Eve Sturges talks with individuals whose worlds have been upended by DNA surprises.

She sits down, for example, with Joy, who was told at age 10 she was donor conceived and who, growing up, had little if any interest in her birthfather. But when facts later emerged to demonstrate how much like him she was, she became driven to learn everything she could about him—a process she likened to dating—and thus developed a profound relationship with a man she’d never known, the birthfather who died many years earlier. As Sturges observed, Joy didn’t know she was missing pieces until the pieces fell into place.

And there’s Mesa, who, before learning that she was an NPE, had had a tumultuous childhood and already was no stranger to trauma. Her discovery triggered a bewildering identity crisis; suddenly she had a Hispanic heritage about which she knew nothing. Learning that she had no connection to the family she’d grown up thinking were “her people” and wanting to connect with her biological family turned her life upside down. In situations such as these, Sturges observed, where NPEs reach out and connect with their biological families, they in some ways also must become disconnected from the family they’ve known.

The second season of novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro’s riveting “Family Secrets” podcast recently launched in iTunes’ Top 10, a testament to the fact that humans have a deep desire to see what’s behind the curtain, to get at the truth of what we hide or what’s been hidden from us. The author deftly satisfies this urge, indulging our voyeuristic impulses as she unburdens guests of their long-held deepest secrets and bears witness to the lasting impact, both of the secrets themselves and of their ultimate revelations.

But there’s nothing sensationalized or salacious about these secrets or their disclosures. Even as guests detail stories we might never have imagined, sometimes mournful and often harrowing, they reveal a slice of common humanity. Shapiro in each episode homes in on the core emotions from which virtually all secrets arise and which all secrets arouse—shame, guilt, fear—feelings that resonate for everyone and, thus, stir empathy and compassion.